Tarot & Rapid Brain Change

I still have the tarot deck mentioned below, and one other besides, and after seven years or so I still fool around with Tarot and it still yields difficult, fascinating truths for myself and others. And incidentally, though it is not my policy to name the cult in which I was enrolled, there is certainly a pretty good hint in this entry…

Tarot was the vice I was most eager to acquire…

The fundamentalist Christian cult to which I belonged for 17 years had a special horror of divination in general and of Tarot in particular. Tarot cards were declared unequivocally to be Satanic and the cult’s dreary magazines used Tarot images as a sort of graphic shorthand for all that is demonic and perverse. So naturally, when I began to deprogram myself, Tarot was the vice I was most eager to acquire and I soon found myself in a Borders bookstore, contemplating the locked glass case that sequestered the Tarot deck’s concentrated occult essence from unsuspecting shoppers. Following the advice of various disreputable websites—and with my heart in my throat—I bought myself a classic Rider-Waite-Smith deck along with a basic text on Tarot symbolism.

Almost immediately the deck began to perplex and fascinate me. Though I was not, alas, possessed or even visited by demons, the cards did give me uncanny insight into my own psychological state and were occasionally and unmistakably prophetic.

As an example, I early on decided to deal myself one card that would give me insight into the coming year of my life. As I was shuffling a card sprang from the deck, seemingly of its own accord, and so I accepted it.

It was the Tower, a trump that augurs sudden change and in fact that single year saw dramatic transformations in my spirituality, career, and family. But even more than the accurate prediction the card’s specific imagery spoke directly to me: it depicts a watchtower being destroyed by divine lightning. A man and a woman, separated by the tower, are falling headlong into a black abyss. The application to my own religious upheavals and the end of my marriage was, at times, unbearably poignant but also, at times, a source of grim relief – though harsh, the disruption was, at root, divine.

It is easy to dismiss this story as a vague coincidence or perhaps as a case of self-fulfilling prophecy and if it makes you feel better I encourage you to do just that. But it was my experience and I couldn’t deny it so easily, though I wasted much time trying to believe in some comfortable explanation for the Tarot deck’s inexplicable behavior. But uncanny examples kept accruing – for instance, one night I dreamt of a Tarot spread and the next morning I immediately shuffled the deck and dealt the cards I had just dreamed! In fact, like dreams, whenever I work with Tarot for more than a few days startling synchronicities pile up like firewood.

And again, I encourage you to not believe me – go and have your own weird experiences. But speaking for myself, I have been forced to accept that the future and the present are somehow entwined, that the world is irreducibly strange, and that sometimes wisdom really can be found ‘in the cards’.

And this, I think, is the real reason that Tarot is so disliked by scientists, fundamentalists, and others caught up in rigid belief systems. Just fooling around with these 78 bits of pasteboard will, soon enough, provide personally irrefutable evidence that there are more things in heaven and earth than are accounted for in our puny dogmas, and when that Tower begins to crumble… the results can be very disturbing.

Did you like this essay? You’ll love my books!

The book advertised, Tarot Plain and Simple by Anthony Louis, is my recommendation for a truly superb introduction to the use of Tarot for fortunetelling.

Tagged as: fringe, occult, weird beliefs